SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a multi-tier web application on AWS. They want to ensure that the web tier can scale automatically based on CPU utilization. Which AWS service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Elastic Load Balancing with automatic scaling, but ELB only distributes traffic and does not add or remove instances; the Auto Scaling group is the service that actually scales the compute capacity.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Auto Scaling groups
Auto Scaling groups (Option C) are the correct service because they directly manage the automatic scaling of EC2 instances based on defined policies, such as a target CPU utilization threshold. When CPU utilization exceeds the threshold, the Auto Scaling group launches new instances to handle the load, and it terminates instances when utilization drops, ensuring the web tier scales automatically.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon CloudFront
Why it's wrong here
CloudFront is a content delivery network that caches and serves content at edge locations; it does not launch or terminate EC2 instances in response to CPU load. It is tempting because it improves web-tier performance and availability, which would be correct for accelerating static content delivery.
- ✗
Amazon Route 53
Why it's wrong here
Route 53 provides DNS resolution and routing policies such as latency or failover; it cannot add or remove web-tier compute capacity when CPU rises. It is tempting because it distributes traffic across endpoints, which would be correct for directing users to healthy regions.
- ✓
Auto Scaling groups
Why this is correct
Auto Scaling groups adjust the number of EC2 instances in the web tier based on CloudWatch CPU utilisation metrics, scaling out under load and in when idle. This delivers the automatic, demand-driven scaling the multi-tier design requires.
- ✗
Elastic Load Balancing
Why it's wrong here
Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming requests across registered targets but does not itself provision or terminate instances based on CPU utilisation. It is tempting because it works alongside scaling to spread load, which would be correct for balancing traffic across an existing fleet.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAP-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SAP-C02 exam.